The Enshittification of America
In Acme we trust.
Enshittification is not a new idea.
Cory Doctorow (go read him now!) coined the term back in 2022, to describe the behavior of platforms on the internet. A more descriptive but less colorful term is “platform decay.”
The gist is this: a platform offers its users a product that is well-designed, economical, and meets a need. The platform offers this service at a discount, attracting customers but losing money, or data that can be sold for money (think Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook).
They burn through their venture capital.
And then they change the terms of the agreement, usually as a slow cascade of decreasing quality. They degrade the customer experience and raise prices so they can make money again and placate shareholders.
Doctorow is a better writer and thinker than I, so I’ll let him define his own term:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. - Cory Doctorow
He calls Facebook “terminally enshittified.” In the early days of Facebook, you got every post your friends put online, in the order they were posted, and very little else. Then, sponsored posts began to creep in. Suggested posts started popping up. You couldn’t always see what your friends were posting. Certain posts were amplified, others buried. And, bit by bit, it turned into the experience we have now: your time on Facebook is guided by algorithms whose only goal is to point you toward those entities who have paid them, while they scrape your browser for every bit of data you allowed them to when you blindly signed the Terms of Service.
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We’ve all watched this happen to the internet at large. I remember back in the day, when the internet seemed like a brave new world, promising the democratizing idea of a new online “access to tools” (a wonderful phrase borrowed from The Whole Earth Catalog and Stuart Brand), so that we all could design our own graphics, write our own blogs, develop our own applications, create our own world. I worked in IT during those years, and I remember being filled with optimism about what we then called “the World Wide Web.” It seemed like magic to me. Google was my friend.
Now, 25 years or so later, what do we have? Page upon page of AI-written slop, commented on by angry bots. The Dead Internet theory comes to mind, where 90% of the internet is a fiction, inorganic pages created by non-human minds. That theory spins out into conspiracy theory very easily, and while I’ll not promote those particular ideas here today, I’m a believer in many of them.
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The idea of the enshittification of government is not new either, but it’s one that comes to mind multiple times a day, often enough so that I chose to write about it today. This is how platform decay in American government plays out in my mind.
Let’s call the platform democracy. Let’s call our right and duties as citizens the customer experience. Let’s call taxes the price of the platform.
The billionaires currently in charge of the American experience are preparing us for platform degradation, literally every day in the press. The current phrase being thrown around is “waste, fraud and abuse,” always the same words in the same order (just like “diversity, equity and inclusion”) so it’s easy to remember, repeat, and drumbeat on right-wing airwaves endlessly.
Of course, the war against “waste, fraud and abuse” will eventually morph into a degraded customer experience. Cuts or delays or closed offices in Medicaid, in Medicare, in Social Security. They’re softening the ground already. House Republicans have mentioned it, Senate Republicans have mentioned it, and Trump and his unelected billionaire sidekick talk about it daily.
Degrade the experience.
The exact same game plan is being laid out for the Department of Education. They drop “waste, fraud and abuse” into every interview every Republican sits in on about the Department of Education. But 13% of K-12 schools money currently comes from the feds. Do a little thought experiment with me, and ask yourself what is going to happen to your schools in the Fall. Do you expect them to trim the fat and make teaching more 13% efficient? Or do you expect them to degrade the educational experience in the US, and teach more kids with fewer teachers and fewer textbooks? I know on what side I’m betting.
Degrade the experience.
Of course I’m against “waste, fraud and abuse.” What reasonable person isn’t? But the complexities of education and the importance of it to our citizenry requires a methodical approach, not Wile E. Coyote with a wheelbarrow of dynamite.
If you believe that the current administration is genuinely cutting “waste, fraud and abuse” from American government, I have one more thought experiment for you. After all the Trump/DOGE cuts, do you think your taxes are going down? Or will your tax money drift into the pockets of billionaires?
Unless you are in the top 1%, I’m guessing the answer to that question is no.
Degrade the experience.
Peace.